All professional musicians, whether they’re playing jazz, rock, bluegrass and country music, have spent their first years of practicing bent over a half speed record player. You might be wondering what does this have to do with trying to learn to play the guitar by ear. As you will learn from this article, it actually has a lot to do with it.
Slowing Things Down
In order to learn to play the guitar by ear you have to begin with learning the melodies, chords and leads from a recording. To be able to do this, you’ve got to slow them down a bit. Some exceptionally gifted people with really good ears are able to learn to play some slow songs just by listening to them at a normal speed. However, even those folks have problems with learning faster melodies and need to slow things down.
Most of us can’t even figure out slow songs just by listening to them at a normal speed. While most of us can match a note with our guitar or voice if it’s the only thing we’re hearing, we tend to get confused when lots of notes are played together. If you slow the music down, we can separate the notes and play them piece by piece until we learn the...